Climate change is real and dangerous. Those who purport to write intelligently about it have a grave responsibility to humanity. The Ministry for the Future fails to deal with climate change responsibly.
Novels – good ones anyway – show the reader (or listener) the complexities of human subjectivity. In The Ministry for the Future, to the contrary, most of the characters most of the time are simply mouthpieces for the author’s ideas, rather than individual subjectivities. To speculate, this could be purposeful and a result of the author’s Marxian political commitments, according to which, in many cases, the portrayal of human subjectivity is dismissed as bourgeois individualism.
Be that as it may, clearly the characters take a back seat to ideas in this work of Cli-Fi. So probably most readers/listeners are there for the ideas. How do the ideas fare when scrutinized critically? In some cases, not very well. I will here outline some crucial mistakes in the beginning of the book. The first chapter is a foundational one that sets up the action of the rest of the novel. However, by focusing on that chapter I do not mean to suggest that the rest of the book is free of similar mistakes.
A disaster in the first chapter serves as the prime mover for what follows. Weather that includes a stagnant high pressure system in northern India (state of Uttar Pradesh) featuring both high temperature and somewhat high humidity causes the death of 20,000,000 Indians, sometime around the year 2025 or so, in July. It is pretty difficult for a fiction that is so-called “hard” science fiction to come up with such a strong and lasting heat wave. Nothing even close has ever happened in the climatological record of the past couple of centuries, and climate change won’t change the climate that much in just a few years. So the author has to assume a few things in an attempt at verisimilitude. There is a high-pressure system that stays in place. OK. The monsoon is late that year, so the usual cooling rains don’t come, and it is July, and the sky is cloudless because of the high. OK, I guess, but there can’t be much humidity in such a high without humid air blowing in (the monsoon) from the ocean.
The author makes a few specific mistakes in setting up the disaster. The heat wave initially is supposedly at 103 degrees F, relative humidity 35%. OK; this happens even in my state in the northern US, albeit rarely. But the author’s description is false: “Ordinary town in Uttar Pradesh, 6 AM. He looked at his phone: 38 degrees. In Fahrenheit that was— he tapped— 103 degrees. Humidity about 35 percent. The combination was the thing. A few years ago it would have been among the hottest wet-bulb temperatures ever recorded. Now just a Wednesday morning.”
The most obvious problem with the quoted passage is that 38C is not equal to 103F. In fact the Fahrenheit analog to 38C is 100.4. The conversion between C and F is middle school arithmetic, involving addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. There is no excuse for this simple mistake, and it confuses (at least for American readers used to temperatures in Fahrenheit) the whole point of the weather event, which turns out to be much less dangerous (assuming the temperature in C is the correct one), and much more common, than the event the author is constructing. [Calculation: (9/5) * 38 + 32 = 100.4F]
However, in the book under review the weather keeps getting hotter (to 42C), and the humidity rises (finally to 60%) even though it is getting hotter and the monsoon with its moisture is not blowing. At that fictional point, the wet-bulb temperature would indeed be about 35C, and after six hours or so of that, since the electric power has failed, people will die. And they do – 20,000,000 of them, leaving one person to survive – Frank May, an American volunteer from Jacksonville.
Two issues regarding the cause and effect here. First, to get to the fatal fictional (and very high given the high temperature) relative humidity of 60%, the author simply writes it down. Otherwise, it is unmotivated – no cause and effect is given. In other words, the humidity is simply conjured up by the keyboard of the author. Note that the relationship of increasing heat to relative humidity is that, other things equal (and there are no other causal factors mentioned), the relative humidity will decrease, not increase.
Second, 20,000,000 Indians die. The lone American survives. This survival is ascribed to the good diet and health of Americans in general, as opposed to Indians, an obvious political allegory (given the clearly stated ideological commitments of the author) for the privilege of rich northern countries versus relatively poor southern ones like India. Is this what would happen, though? Probably not. The inhabitants of Uttar Pradesh are adapted, acclimated, and acclimatized to hot weather and to humid weather. It is the American who, most likely, would have been among the first to die under Indian conditions, and political ideology should not overrule that fact in what is presented as hard science fiction.
In reviews there have been many complaints about the flat characters in The Ministry for the Future, and some complaints about the verisimilitude of the political events. For example, Francis Fukuyama has called the way nation-state politics works out in the hopeful trajectory in the novel “ludicrously unrealistic.” Certainly the author of a book about the future should be given some leeway. On the other hand, hard science fiction should follow plausible scientific understanding. In its most dramatic scene, the book under review does not do so.